Okay, this morning I am going to put on my Navy hat and respond to some news. Serving as a naval officer for nine years left me with a great knowledge of Naval customs and traditions; a personal interest in naval history (that dates to long before I entered the U.S. Naval Academy) in general only serves to magnify this. Thus, for most of my life, I have had a great interest in the Navy and its history, and naval affairs in general.
Now, on to the meat of this post: this morning, a major Navy-focused news site proffered this story: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/04/navy_murtha_gator_041310w/
The majority of the Navy blogosphere has already responded to this, and the overall opinion seems to be negative. I could not agree more with them! Why all the fuss about naming a warship? Because this is a decades-old issue that always seems to recur. for inexplicably political reasons alone. The LPD 17 class of amphibious ships is new to the fleet; so far, each ship has been named for a U.S. city. Now, the revelation that the latest ship will be named after a recently deceased member of the House of Representatives that was not the strongest advocate of the military (even though he was the chair of the House defense appropriations subcommittee - the main reason this is happening in the first place).
In the past, the Navy stuck to a generally concrete convention for the assignment of names to its ships. Aircraft carriers were names for famous battles; cruisers for U.S. cities; submarines for maritime fauna; destroyers for naval heroes and other persons of great importance in Navy history. Somewhere around the late 1960s, sporadic exceptions to these conventions began occurring (USS GLENARD P. LIPSCOMB; USS HYMAN G. RICKOVER; USS THOMAS S. GATES; and so on). This USS JOHN MURTHA, however, is one of the worst names ever conceived for a warship - in ten years, when the warship has been in active service, who (aside from the crew assigned to the ship) amongst the general populace will recognize this name?
Please, just pick a naming scheme and stick with it!
